Archive for the ‘HP Lovecraft’ tag

Visions Cosmiques—Improvisations Dédiées À L’équipage D’Apollo 8 (1969) by Jean Guillou. No designer credited. • 50 years ago this weekend Apollo 8 was on its way to the Moon. Jean Guillou’s album of organ improvisations took the mission as its inspiration although his turbulent music seems more suited to the near-disaster of Apollo 13 than […]

Cover for the now-defunct Cthulhu Sex magazine, volume 2, no. 23. Art by Chad Savage. • Revising Lovecraft: The Mutant Mythos by Paul StJohn Mackintosh. Mackintosh was interviewed at Greydogtales in 2016 where he made a point that certainly chimes with my experience: “…the English-speaking genre community seems to have far more trouble with certain […]

The Dunwich Horror (1972). Art by Victor Valla. El horror de Dunwich y otros relatos is the last of the books I was working on earlier this year for Spanish publisher Editorial Alma. This was a more stimulating Lovecraft collection to work on than the previous two-story volume since three of the stories were ones […]

• Julia Holter’s next album, Aviary, will arrive next month with a cover design bearing astrological symbols (a cryptic message?) and what looks like a grimoire page in the background, although I may be reading too much into this. Whatever the esoterics signify, the album is a double, and going by the sound of new […]

Inside an O’Neill Cylinder, an orbital megastructure. Painting by Don Davis, 1975. • RIP Lindsay Kemp: dancer, actor, choreographer and (if we have to drop names) mentor to David Bowie and Kate Bush. Kemp’s work has been featured here on a number of occasions, particularly his landmark productions of an all-male Salomé, and Flowers, A […]

I mentioned in the post about the Sherlock Holmes illustrations that the next book from Editorial Alma featuring my work would be another Lovecraft collection. One of the illustrations in the new volume was of the planet Yuggoth, a world known to human beings as Pluto. In Lovecraft’s mythos Yuggoth has long been an outpost […]

The Miracle (Genet’s Dream) (2001) by Delmas Howe. • “Zachary Lipton, an assistant professor at the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, watched with frustration as this story transformed from ‘interesting-ish research’ to ‘sensationalized crap’.” Oscar Schwartz on how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong. • The Aesthetics of Science Fiction: what does SF […]

Wu Ming, a communist writing collective known for its historical fiction, sees Kolosimo as using pseudohistory as a tool to shake people from their belief that capitalist society is natural and transhistorical, opening minds to other possibilities for how humans can live. They regret that popular proponents of his theories today, like Graham Hancock and […]

• I’ve wondered for years why there was such a difference in quality between Plight & Premonition (1988) and Flux + Mutability (1989), a pair of instrumental albums by David Sylvian and Holger Czukay. The former warrants repeated listening while the latter…doesn’t. David Sylvian‘s reminiscences about the recording sessions are enlightening. • “There’s something evil […]

Cover art by Leo & Diane Dillon, 1975. Art is not supposed to be easier! There are a lot of things in life that are supposed to be easier. Ridding the world of heart attacks, making the roads smoother, making old people more comfortable in the winter, but not Art. Art should always be tough. Art should demand […]

Lovecraft: The Myth of Cthulhu, an English-language edition of three comic-strip adaptations by Esteban Maroto, is now available from IDW. • The Coffin House, a short story by Robert Aickman that’s a taster for the new Aickman collection, Compulsory Games. Anwen Crawford wrote an introduction to Aickman’s world of “strange stories” for The New Yorker. […]

HR Giger’s art books were always very thorough in detailing all the media manifestations of the artist’s work, including film and television appearances. For years this presented tantalising questions, especially regarding the lengthy pre-Alien documentaries that were listed there: what were these films, and when would we get to see them? Giger’s Necronomicon (1976) did […]

Cover art for the 1921 edition by W. Otway Cannell. • “An exiled recluse, an ancient abode in the remote west of Ireland, nightly attacks by malevolent swine-things from a nearby pit, and cosmic vistas beyond time and space. The House on the Borderland has been praised by China Miéville, Terry Pratchett, and Clark Ashton […]

Abyzou. Presenting my illustrations for The Demons of King Solomon, a horror anthology edited by Aaron French. This is a follow up to Aaron’s The Gods of HP Lovecraft which was published by JournalStone in 2015. I did 6 illustrations for the Lovecraft volume, covering half the stories whereas the new book has illustrations of […]

Workwise, this year has been a major one for interior illustration. So far I’ve completed about 80 illustrations for different titles, and I’m still not finished. The majority of the work has been for a Spanish publisher, Editorial Alma, based in Barcelona. Earlier this year they launched a line of reprints of classic works of […]

• It won’t be out until late January—and then in the UK only—but the blu-ray premiere of The Mystery of Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot was announced this week. The initial run of the discs (there’s also a DVD) will include a booklet containing my essay about the film, something I was very pleased and […]

A pair of albums by friends of mine are released this month: the first, Journey to the West (1979–2017) by Watch Repair presents The Mystic Umbrellas, has been gestating for several years; the second, Dreaming Dangerous Rainbows by Albatross Project, came together very quickly earlier this year after song sketches led to an album that none […]

Untitled painting by Serbian Surrealist Ljuba Popovic (1934–2016). I missed the announcement of Popovic’s death last year. • Bryan Washington on the radical grace of Gengoroh Tagame: My Brother’s Husband and the tradition of gay manga. Where bara artists are concerned, I favour the work of Mentaiko Itto. Bruno Gmünder recently published a collection in […]

Human Nature by Esther Sarto. • I Feel Love: “Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder created the template for dance music as we know it”. Bill Brewster on the creation of one of the greatest songs ever recorded. • The Tearoom by Robert Yang “is a (free) historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and […]